In a quirk of fate, I met someone from IBM who was directly involved in implementing the wiretapping system that is all over the news. It is much worse than the news would suggest.

As some have reported, this is definitely not just NSA. The bidding for the technology to do this project was conducted by members of the FBI and the CIA. During the proposal process, IBM was told explicitly that they were to answer questions, not ask them.

One of the most noteworthy comments was that the Government had specified 60 Terabytes of monthly storage for digital versions of conversations. MONTHLY!

At about 11k per call, that is about 6 million conversations per month. (correct my math if you are better at computers!).

This is enormous.

People in the press are concerned that they are tapping the phones of people without just cause. What they are really doing is much, much worse.

In reality, they are tapping hundreds of thousands of lines all the time. This is KGB stuff.

Every call is stored digitally and indexed accurately, creating an archive that can be used for political purposes in the future. This is not reels of tape that would require massive effort to file through and might become useless quickly. It is highly indexed information that is being kept in storage. Two years from now, they could look into particular phone numbers to check in on cell and land lines.

It is cell and land lines

They are running filters on every conversation for Farsi and other languages in real time

This is domestic spying on a massive scale, not just a few wiretaps without a judge. This should be cause for impeachment.